Mike Lewis on Botting

There is a new article up on the Guild Wars 2 main page, outlining the Arena Net team's successes against bots thus far. There are some good gems in this articles such as,

At least these rangers are clothed.

In the month of November, we terminated over 34,000 accounts for operating bots in Guild Wars 2. Moreover, we have observed a serious decrease in the population of bots in the game – and so have you, our players. The number of bots reported every hour worldwide has dropped from more than 2,000 in October to a much healthier 20 as of this writing.

Excellent news indeed. The effects of this can been seen in the trading post prices, and in the game world. No more naked rangers with bears running around everywhere. Hopefully, they keep up the pressure. I saw a pair bots the other day in my barracuda farming spot.

The article goes on to detail ways they will continue to attack that bot problem, including having actual people on patrol in the world of Tyria! Anyway, head over and give this article a read.

"Another way we identify and combat bots is through manual observation. Our GM staff is equipped to monitor the game around the clock and detect bots from within the game itself. We have a considerable task force assigned to patrolling the world and eliminating bots, as well as helping us continue to improve and refine our automatic detection tools."